


Blues

by War_Lioness



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-04
Updated: 2013-04-04
Packaged: 2017-12-07 11:36:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/748097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/War_Lioness/pseuds/War_Lioness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's funny how a simple piece of cloth can seem to define your entire life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blues

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spiritofemby](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiritofemby/gifts).



The first time you wear your dress blues is at your flight school graduation. A “fuck you” to the legacy zoomies and fighter jocks who gave you shit since day one and aren’t half the pilot you are. Your primary instructor, a grizzled First Contact vet who can still, at seventy-five, fly circles around her students, pulls you aside at the graduation dinner and lays a hand heavy with experience and responsibility on your shoulder.

“You keep that attitude, kid.” She gives you one of those intense looks that earned her her callsign “Cutter” a hundred years ago. “Don’t ever let those chuckleheads beat that out of you. Because they’ll try. Oh, the shape of the harassment will change; less shaving cream in your helmet and more sniping behind your back. It’ll never let up, because you’re better than they are and they know it.  You’ll never fly a fighter and some commanders will hold that against you. If you’re lucky though, and God knows you’ve got the devil’s own luck, you’ll get one of the good ones.”

Her coffee-brown eyes go misty with recollection. She isn’t in this dingy Alliance school house anymore. She is running missions out on the edge of space, fighting off an alien invasion and saving lives. When she comes back, it’s with a new sadness in her eyes.

“When you do, they’ll see the way you can make a frigate dance. It’ll be tough, and they’ll ask you to do things that seem impossible, but you’ll do them. They’ll bring out your very best. When that happens, and you’ll know it in heartbeats, you grab on. Grab on with both hands and never let go. No matter what happens. And keep that attitude.

The next time you wear your blues, you are too distraught to notice how the polyester itches and the way the seams scratch your skin, leaving long, angry red marks that last for days. Your legs ache with strain and sweat rolls down your back, staining your undershirt, turning the high neck of your jacket into a prison. But you ignore it, keeping your eyes locked on the empty coffin as Taps plays and the rifles fire. Three volleys to chase a soul into the afterlife as the casket lowers slowly into the Virginia soil.

There’s not much you remember clearly from that day in Arlington, but, for the next two years, you see the glitter of the June sun off brass fittings every time you close your eyes. Well, whenever you don’t see her eyes pleading with you as the portal hisses shut on the escape pod.

The incident investigation recovers video from the pod and the glare reflected off her visor too much to see through, but you still see her eyes go wide with realization in the instant before the beam strikes again. You wake with her name on your lips more nights than not.

For a while after that fateful, terrible day in the skies over Alchera, you begin to fear you’ll never be able to get out of your blues. In the months after the funeral, you meet with more boards, committees and commissions than you ever imagined existed on the homeworld. You spend a lot of time traveling, but none of it flying. You’re grounded, and the itch to wrench the controls from the idiot they have ferrying you from station to Citadel to planet is almost overwhelming.

So many inquiries, inquests, investigations and a lot of other “I” words you don’t give a shit about, need your testimony. As the weeks and months wear on, you begin to get the feeling they’re not so much looking for explanations as they are for scapegoats. They call you to witness, to repeat your story for the millionth time, but their questions have changed.

“How did the enemy ship sense the Normandy?”

“Are you sure you properly engaged the stealth systems?”

“Could you have inadvertently signaled the other ship?”

“Why didn’t your sensors detect the other ship earlier?”

“Walk us through the steps you took and decisions you made.”

“Why didn’t you evacuate when the order was first given?”

When the quiet, confident woman sits down at your table after a particularly frustrating session, it’s no surprise. You’re no dummy, you know what the insignia on her lapel means, but you haven’t flown anything more exciting than a skycar in almost a year and she’s offering you full flight privileges and a pretty sweet benefits package, including cutting edge medical.

At first, you can barely stand to look out the ship’s windows. Every time you do, you see her floating away from you, stretching out a hand you failed to grasp. You’ve abandoned your blues forever, trading them in for white and black and orange, hoping you can leave her behind as well. But any craft you fly has an invisible copilot. You never really were lucky.

Eventually, you learn to lose yourself in the emptiness between stars.

There’s a new set of blues in your closet now.

And a ring burning a hole in your pocket.

EDI said they were called Victory Rings. You don’t feel particularly victorious: there’s a greasy knot of apprehension sitting in your stomach. You finger the hard lump of the ring box through the material of your trousers, reassuring yourself for the millionth time that it’s still there.

You catch sight of her through the watery blue light of the aquarium that is the restaurant’s signature feature. Her eyes light up the way they only do for you. Your breath catches in your throat. You whisper a silent prayer to all the gods that she’ll forgive you for usurping the dinner she’d obviously spent a lot of time and thought on.

You never get the chance.

Later, as you and Cortez try frantically to block the hijacked Normandy, the other man has the audacity to ask if you popped the question yet. You blush furiously and thank your luck that the open comm line is still jammed, and that the arrival of the shuttle has made it too hot for split attention.

On the way back to the docks, after the clone makes her thrilling, yet messy entrance into the 197th floor of the Kanala building, he asks the question again, subtly encouraging you to act now. And, considering his own history, the box in your pocket burns with fresh urgency.

In the small hours of the morning, after the raucous party has begun to wind down, you slip the ring onto her finger. Because there’s no time like the present, and if you all die tomorrow, well, your blues will work for that too.


End file.
